IT projects must align with business objectives

Nov 15, 2007

Today, CIOs and IT directors need the ability to rationalise both the applications they are running and the projects that support them, ensuring they are aligned with key business objectives. At the same time, they must control IT costs to allow funding of initiatives that offer the greatest benefit to the organisation. Finally, they must be able to justify IT expenditures and convey the business value that they are delivering.

Paul Viviers, MD of PM Sight, leaders in Project and Portfolio management believes, “To succeed in these pursuits, IT departments must overcome three significant challenges, complicated by the constantly changing business requirements. First, they must manage a complex array of applications across the enterprise, even though they often lack a system for tracking all the applications they’re supporting and the associated costs. "Second, they must assess and manage a variety of IT projects that historically have not been evaluated for strategic relevance, which has resulted in supporting initiatives that are of little or no value to the business. Third, they must bridge the obvious disconnect which separates IT departments and the business goals of the organisation and compromises effective management of applications, projects and resources.”Recognising that technology and business units must operate in an integrated environment, PMSight has developed PM Revolution for IT Governance. Using PMSight’s top-down approach to portfolio management, by providing organisations with technology that can drive project and task automation in conjunction with performance monitoring across their systems. PM Revolution enables organisations to base decisions on performance, more closely monitor performance, and provides “look-ahead” capabilities so proactive decisions can be taken before projects get into trouble. As part of the IT Governance solution, PM Revolution leverages the underlying Microsoft technologies, particularly the rich collaborative features of Windows Sharepoint Services 3 and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services 2007. Additionally it accommodates an integrated information repository across the disparate Microsoft databases, SAP, cost data and additional LOB repositories to provide a single launch pad to enable powerful data analytics and visualisation spanning the entire project lifecycle, enabling all stakeholders within the organisation to maintain a business perspective of IT investments throughout the project lifecycle. Using our technology and the Microsoft Office EPM platform in tandem, organisations are able to track IT spending and performance, and optimise IT budgets and planning.“With enhanced decision-making capabilities, executives can align all IT initiatives with strategic business goals, ensuring that the most strategically relevant investments are funded and enabling the organisation to ‘do more with less’," explains Viviers.Maximising the IT budget often means finding investments to eliminate. Organisations need to objectively assess applications across their enterprise, they need to know precisely each application’s value – and cost – to the business and need processes in place to effectively decide which applications to keep, which to replace and which to retire. This, in turn, drives the selection of the appropriate application-related projects to fund or cancel. Decision-makers can use our solution to explore “what if” scenarios to understand the relationships among applications before selecting, executing or canceling projects.PMSight understands the need for clients to improve the organisational IT Governance through improvements to technology, processes, people and governance structures. We believe that these components should grow at an equal rate to enable overall maturity growth. For this reason, PM Revolution is modular and highly configurable, and can be, based on clients’ needs, implemented and configured in a number of different ways” concludes Viviers.